What does Blue Dragon do?

Blue Dragon reaches out to kids in crisis throughout Vietnam.

Our residential facilities, centres, and programs give children and youth a new chance in life: the chance to have a home, a good education, and happy, stable living conditions.

We aim to break the poverty cycle by offering education, training, and job opportunities to those who need them the most: street kids, child victims of trafficking, and the rural poor.

In my own words: Minh

Blue Dragon Blog

It’s all happening!

At long last, we're making some good progress on plans to open new centres for street kids here in Hanoi.

For over a year we have been looking for possible new places to open centres, but it's only in the past 2 months that we have really worked out what we're going to do.

The problem, in short, is that our current drop in centre for street kids is just too small. When we moved here 5 years ago, it was huge - but somehow it's shrunk! Or perhaps we just have more kids coming...

So we've needed to secure a place that's bigger, and where we can be confident of staying for years to come.

The new space we have found is a tall building with a yard out the front, and it's in a great location for street kids to find us. The access for people with disabilities is terrific, too: that's always a problem with buildings in Hanoi.

But we're not moving right away from our current centre. We'll be keeping one space that we currently use as a parking area, and converting it into a new centre for children aged under 12. Every week we seem to have new little kids hanging out in the centre. These are children who live with their extended family - often a grandmother or older sister - but during the days they're left out on the streets to fend for themselves. They really need their own space, with some specialist attention, so we're starting to dream about how their new centre might look.

Another new feature of our plan is to include semi-independent accommodation for the older teens who have jobs, but still need some support to keep them on track.

So the plans are taking shape, and now it's time for us to find the resources to make this happen. If you're on the Blue Dragon email list, you'll have received a message about it by now; if not, take a look here

In coming days I'll post some photos of the new centre, which is just a tall empty building right now and is going to need a lot of work to get ready for the kids.

And for sure, it will be a lot of work... but it will be worth it!


So far…

Here's a quick summary of what Blue Dragon has done since we started helping kids in Vietnam almost 10 years ago... 



To date, Blue Dragon has:
Sent 2,393 kids back to school and training 
Provided accommodation to 114 girls and boys 
Served 261,705 meals 
Built or repaired 52 homes for families 
Distributed 33,621 litres of milk 
Handed out 331,354 kilos of rice 
Reunited 109 runaway children with their families 
Taken 915 kids to a doctor or hospital 
Put 5 teens through drug rehab 
Obtained legal registration papers for 782 children 
Rescued 195 trafficked children 
Placed 72 teens in jobs 
Played 1094 games of soccer! 

The view


I wrote recently that Blue Dragon is dreaming of open some new safe spaces for Hanoi's streets kids.

We've found a new building that will become our new HQ, centre, and anti-trafficking base all in one. There's a lot of work to be done to get it ready, but it's going to be great. The kids will love it.

For now, just a 'teaser'... here's a view from the roof. You have to bend your mind to see it, though; it's a 360 degree shot. Click on the image to get the full view.

We've got some work to do!